I keep discovering new uses for aliases. Here’s the latest.
For literature notes, I’ve adopted a convention “Author1999KeyTitlewords” for page titles. It’s nicely compact, and it keeps me from running afoul of the restrictions on what punctuation you can use in page titles (since they’re also filenames). But sometimes I want to see a full title and/or multiple authors in the text I’m typing. By adding more title info to the alias in the metadata, I get several benefits:
- the option of including a longer, more informative title of the source for the literature note;
- autocompletion picks up more words from the full title (see also my forum tip on this);
- emojis in the page title (which I’m experimenting with as useful for sorting files) don’t clutter up the Preview version of the page.
The screenshot shows what I do:
And this is what it looks like, in Preview, to use this alias in the text:
BTW: if you’re interested in a pre-publication version of this article, it’s available from my ResearchGate page.